As an email addict I’ve been doing all I can to avoid having my gMail client open so I can be as productive as possible throughout my day. For ages I’ve been using Notify to show me when new mail arrives and give me a quick preview so I know whether to bother to opening my mail. This was without a doubt the most popular menu-bar app in my toolbox and has been invaluable.

I’ll admit to having a bit of a problem with email because I am addicted to checking it and have an OCD when it comes to making sure I never have unread mail for longer than 2 minutes. I’m obsessed. I get the sweats when I see other people’s inBoxes and they have like 10,000 unread emails … makes me really uncomfortable.

So today while obsessing over all the email notifications coming in via Basecamp I decided to look to see if there was an update to Notify. And there was! AND it’s awesome!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Keith Lang from Skitch sent me this tip …

… and a link to a great extension for your mac that allows you to choose a hex in the Apple colour-picker dialogue.
Thanks Keith.

I recently discovered Skitch and have been raving about it as an Image Markup application. I’ve now also discovered that the Aviary suite also has an Image Markup tool called Falcon that works inside the browser and is coupled with a Firefox extension called Talon for quickly accessing the tools required to do a snapshot. This got me very excited as although I love Skitch for what it does and how well it does it the allure of doing the same thing completely in the browser was too much to ignore. So I’ve done some tests and here are my thoughts.

The Aviary Firefox plugin is great and allows you to launch your Aviary apps via a neat little menu bar button (although I wish it stuck to the design of the other buttons). The snapshot options allow you to choose a section of the screen, the visible area and also the entire page including the complete drop. This is also available in another plugin called Screengrab! and was a very useful way of viewing the design of a site outside of the browser. You can grab sites you admire. Like this one.

The first thing I noticed was that after selecting my snapshot area and hitting the save button it launched Aviary’s default Image editor Phoenix. I then had to save and create a file to open in Falcon. When I did eventually get to edit my image in Falcon I found it to be pretty much the same as Skitch as far as toolset and styling. Performance wasn’t as fast as Skitch overall but this is due to the Flash player and being inside the browser. Personally, this is the biggest issue though. For what I need to do with a tool like this the overall experience was too time consuming and I will be sticking to Skitch for the time being.

This is not to say that the Aviary suite will not be used. It’s important to remember that the Aviary snap will allow you to quickly get a screengrab into a very powerful suite of applications so if your work involves a bit more than just making notes and drawing arrows then this will be the better option. For example, if you were a designer working on some branding ideas and had snapped a logo you liked for inspiration you could very quickly get that snapshot into Raven (Aviary’s vector editor) and draw some curves out over the logo; rapidly generating some ideas for use later. Photographers could grab a snapshot of a photo from a site and open it in Peacock (the effects editor) so they could quickly play with some effects and ideas to use in their own work.

Aviary – I would allow users to login via the Firefox extension and set Falcon as an option when opening your snapshot.
Skitch – something I’d like to see in your tool as it stands is the ability to select an area or the entire snap and scale it up WITHOUT interpolation. I need to zoom in to show individual pixels sometimes.

Another feature I would love to see in any of these tools is the ability to draw a rect around an area of the snapshot and automatically render the rect’s dimensions in pixels next to the rect area. Sometimes I want to measure an area of the screen. The same kind of tool for stamping out the HEX colour of the pixel I’ve clicked on with an accompanying arrow or crosshair. This would be a great way for designers to deliver their designs to developers with dimensions and colour values all set out for them.

http://aviary.com/tools

http://skitch.com

UPDATE:
doodle.png on Aviary.
The plugin is available here.

I discovered Skitch a few days ago now and it has suddenly become completely invaluable to me. Skitch is a screen-grab app for OS X that allows you to quickly annotate and sketch on your grab before quickly uploading it to their site (or Flickr, FTP etc) and then link to or embed it into a blog. Note the use of the word ‘quickly’ there. That’s the key to the success of this tool and why it has become a staple in my arsenal of day-to-day tools.

I use this to grab images of UI work I’m doing, annotate it, upload it and then post a link to the image within a Basecamp message for my client to look at. It’s proven really useful.

While I’m waxing lyrical about tools I’m using here’s a quick list of other great tools I’m using and couldn’t live without at the moment with a quicker reason why.

Firebug – Firefox plugin for debugging CSS, HTML and network activity as well as Actionscript logging via Thunderbolt.

PixelPerfect – overlay a comp in your browser so you can match your development to the designers vision. This saves you a lot of time and effort screen grabbing your dev in the browser and overlaying the results in Photoshop with the original design to see if it all matches correctly. It is still a bit fiddly though and I would love to see an ‘onion-skin’ mode in Apple’s Preview app so I can just sit a window over the browser to do the same thing.

Pixus – this little AIR application is the nicest set of screen calipers I’ve used yet. I did find a screen ruler AIR app called ‘rulers’ but it didn’t allow you to change the registration point which rendered it almost useless.

Evernote – I use this all the time now. Any notes, images, ideas, links etc all get clipped to my Evernote account for safe keeping. Will be the first app I buy on my iPhone when I get one too.

DropBox – store files in the cloud but drop them in there via the finder as if it was on your machine. This works just like your iDisk but allows you to quickly grab the public link and paste it into an email.

MAMP – virtual apache server and MySQL server. Just works instantly. I used to spend days trying to get this stuff to work. Now I can build WordPress themes straight from localhost.

Basecamp – awesome Project management site online. Even if you find yourself flying solo on a project this app will help you stay organised and in control. Use it with Skitch to post grabs of your work and you will never need to clog up in-boxes again.

Versions + Beanstalk = great subversion management. I’ve tried to setup repositories in the past and have had some success but mainly headaches and have lost the files over time. Beanstalk is a site/service that gives you space to store your source code using subversion. Versions is a really nice Mac desktop app that will then allow you to manage the repositories you create. I know keep all my source code in the cloud so I don’t need to worry if my machine fails.

There’s so many more great tools being developed. Please let me know about yours.

From the FITC Flickr pool some screen shots of Flash 10 showing off a neat After-Effects style interface and finally, bones for proper character animation.

There’s no word on advanced audio functionality as yet but here’s hoping Andre gets his way.

It looks like, now that the developers have Flex, Flash can concentrate on what it was originally designed for. I can see myself sitting down and whacking my Wacom again … just like the old days!